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Song of the Stubborn One Thousand
The Watsonville Canning Strike, 1985-87
Peter Shapiro
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eBook - ePub
Song of the Stubborn One Thousand
The Watsonville Canning Strike, 1985-87
Peter Shapiro
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About This Book
On September 9, 1985, one thousand mainly Mexican women workers in Watsonville, California, the "frozen food capital of the world,” were forced out on strike in response to an attempt by Watsonville Canning owner, Mort Console, to break their union. They returned to work eighteen months later. Not one had crossed the picket line. A moribund union has been revitalized, and Watsonville's Latino majority emerged as a major force in local politics.At a time when organized labor was in headlong retreat, the Watsonville Canning strike was a dramatic show of the power of women workers, whose struggle became a rallying point for the Chicano movement.Apart from its sheer drama, the strikers' story illuminates the challenges facing a group of ordinary working people who waged a protracted and ultimately successful struggle against seemingly insurmountable odds.
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Chapter 1
The Frozen Food Capital of the World
Watsonville is located on the northern bank of the Pajaro River, ten miles from its mouth. San Jose is about thirty miles due north as the crow flies; the Salinas Valley, setting for much of John Steinbeckâs fiction, is roughly twenty miles south.
The river flows out of central Californiaâs Coast Ranges, skirting the southern end of the Santa Cruz Mountains and meandering another twenty-five miles west through a lush valley before it empties into Monterey Bay and the Pacific Ocean. The valley is ideal for farming, with rich soil, abundant groundwater, and an unusually long growing season.
In 1868, believing that Pajaro Valley soil gave its apples a unique taste, the Martinelli family began bottling cider in Watsonville. The business still thrives today, operating out of a plant across the street from the local high school. Martinelliâs was arguably the first food processing concern in a town whose economy would eventually come to be defined by the conversion of fresh produce into something that could be shipped great distances and stored for long periods of time.
Pajaro Valley farmers traditionally relied on Watsonvilleâs network of packing sheds to buy and market what they could not sell themselves. Much of it wound up in San Joseâs canneries, only thirty miles away but a world apart socially. Commercial canning involves metal fabrication as well as agricultural processing, and it requires plenty of capital. Californiaâs canneries thus tended to concentrate near industrial centers and were owned, for the most part, by large corporations rather than local entrepreneurs.
With the outbreak of World War II, food processing was transformed. Feeding the troops required a huge expansion of output, but wartime metal shortages made it difficult for canneries to meet the increased demand. Some thirty years earlier, frozen food technology had been developed and patented by Clarence Birdseye. But because it required a serious investment on the consumerâs partânamely, an iceboxâthe idea was slow to catch on. Now the special needs of a war economy had made it suddenly profitable.1
Nor did it require the kind of capital that a traditional cannery did. The technology involved in packing vegetables in wax-dipped containers and freezing them was well within the means of a small investor like Edward Console, who in 1941 converted a packing shed on Ford Street into the first of Watsonvilleâs frozen food plants.2
Console hailed originally from San Jose, and his new company, Watsonville Canning, began as an attempt to can produce closer to the source. But the sudden growth in demand for âquick-freeze productsââand their lower overheadâwere too good to pass up, and Console took advantage of the opportunity before anyone else in Watsonville thought to do so.
Watsonville Canning was soon doing far more freezing than canning. Fresh vegetables, often hand-cut in the fields, were brought in by truck or rail car. The produce was washed outside the plant, then placed on a conveyor and trimmed by hand to uniform length, after which it was steam-treated at 190 degrees Fahrenheit for three minutes to neutralize the enzymes that hastened spoilage. Finally it was packaged, labeled, frozen, and stored until it could be sold.3
âThe military,â one industry insider observes, âis nothing but a giant food-service industry.â4 As often happens, the ready market it offered in wartime expanded into the civilian economy once the fighting ended. With the postwar boom, freezers became affordable for ordinary families, and the advent of frozen food enabled consumers to buy fruits and vegetables out of season in a form that was easy to prepare and retained more flavor and nutrition than canned goods. The newly built supermarkets soon boasted large frozen food sections with an array of new products to tempt shoppers.
David Moore, a Watsonville packer who began in the industry out of high school and gradually worked his way up, recalled that âfrozen was growing more rapidly than freshânot because it was better, but because it was new.â5 As demand soared, frozen food plants began proliferating in Watsonville. The majority did not last, but by 1952 the town had thirteen, with a combined annual output of 40 million pounds. By the end of the decade frozen food had become a billion-dollar industry, with Watsonville accounting for the lionâs share of production.6
For Pajaro Valley growers it was a godsend. The business gave them a measure of relief from the financial pressures of unpredictable crop yields and an uncertain market. They could now put surplus inventory in cold storage, where it could serve as collateral if they needed bank loans. âThe more broccoli they had,â said Moore, âthe more they could borrow.â7
And borrow they did, increasingly tailoring their crops to the frozen food market. At one point 60 percent of the broccoli grown in the region was sold frozen. The coastline along Monterey Bay became âan ocean of brussels sproutsâ as the rise of frozen food allowed area farmers to take full advantage of the local growing conditions uniquely suited for that crop. The Pajaro Valley soon accounted for roughly 90 percent of the brussels sprouts grown in the United States. The area also produced lima beans, cauliflower, and spinach in abundance.8 Watsonville Canning handled the whole rangeâor, more accurately, its workers did.
The greater variety of crops encouraged by the frozen food industry meant a longer harvest season. When the spinach left off at the end of May, cauliflower began. When the fruit harvest ended around Labor Day weekend, brussels sprouts kicked in. Broccoli kept coming out of the fields nine months a year.9
The local labor market changed accordingly. Watsonville stopped being a farming village that ârolled up its sidewalks during the winterâ and became, increasingly, a factory town that required a year-round work force.10
Initially the frozen food plants had drawn their employees from the same temporary labor pool that staffed the packing sheds. It was the sort of work force that characterized many farming communities: housewives augmenting the family income, students in need of summer jobs, the occasional Japanese or Filipino worker whom discrimination had excluded from the primary job market. There was, by and large, no significant cultural divide between the early frozen food workers and the rest of the community.11
But as frozen food expanded, the work force was transformed, and with it the townâs demographic. The plants grew increasingly desperate for workers. A common refrain among those who got jobs was, âAll you had to do was show up.â Gloria Betancourt was just fifteen years old when she was hired by Watsonville Canning in 1962. No one thought to ask her age. Years later, she recalled how easy it was: âYou put on a little makeup, it makes you look older.â (Still, she was careful to keep a low profile when plant manager Kathryn Console, the ownerâs wife, appeared on the shop floor. Mrs. Console, she assumed, knew something about makeup.)12
Two developmentsâone technological, one politicalâmade the transformation possible. The widespread introduction of the forklift in the late 1950s relieved some of the pressure on employers by eliminating much of the heavy lifting involved in frozen food work. This encouraged plants to tap into the local reserves of female labor, and frozen food quickly evolved into âwomenâs work.â But it was the continuing disintegration of the bracero program, culminating in its abolition in 1964, that truly changed the face of the industry.
The bracero program plays a defining role in the standard history of the California farmworkersâ movement. According to this narrative, it was created as a temporary expedient during World War II to deal with wartime labor shortages, allowing a set number of Mexican harvest hands to migrate north as guest workers under strict federal supervision, to be sent back to Mexico once the crops were in. But Californiaâs agribusiness lobby had sufficient clout in Washington to keep the program going after the war ended, thus assuring themselves of a supply of compliant, cheap labor as protection against possible union organizing. Once the bracero program ended in 1964, the story goes, the way was cleared for Cesar Chavez to launch his historic campaign to bring union protection to California farmworkers.
In truth, the bracero program is only one chapter in a much longer story, that of the complex interplay between Mexican labor and US capital since the annexation of northern Mexico by the United States in 1848. Before World War I, Mae Ngai writes, âlabor flowed more or less freely from Mexico into the United States.â Traditional trade routes across the sparsely populated desert of what is now northern Mexico linked the southern part of that country with the southwestern United States, and patterns of circular migration had existed long before English-speaking settlers arrived in the area.13
But Mexican settlements in Texas, California, Arizona, and New Mexico, which had begun as isolated outposts of Spanish colonialism, proved impossible for the Mexican government to defend. Aggressive anglo settlement was soon followed by military conquest. Under the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which brought the USâMexican war to an end, Mexican residents of the disputed territory were to become US citizens by default.
In practice it was largely citizenship in name only. Nor did the newly redrawn border have much effect on population movements: it could be crossed almost at will in either direction. The real changes occurred in the 1880s, when the policies of Porfirio DĂaz effectively opened northern Mexico to capitalist development, and large numbers of Mexicans began migrating to the borderlands and across the frontier:
Construction of the Mexican Central and Mexican National railroads, as well as the opening of new mines and agricultural enterprises, created a great demand for labor in the sparsely-settled north. Once attracted from the villages of southern and central Mexico, men were willing to move even further north, even across the border, in search of higher wages. By 1907 northern Mexican railroads were having difficulty keeping section gangs at full strength. The Mexican National claimed that virtually an entire work crew of 1,500 men had moved into Texas during the year.14
US railroads like Santa Fe and Southern Pacific hired private contractors to station themselves in El Paso, northern terminus for the Mexican Central, to recruit Mexican workers who had just crossed the border. It was rarely necessary to recruit in Mexico proper.
Nor was the workersâ immigration status much of a concern. With the exception of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, the federal government made no serious attempt to impose a systematic immigration policy before 1920, and in any case the frontier conditions that persisted along much of the nationâs southwestern border meant that the few existing laws frequently went unenforced.15 The labor market in the region was free to make its own rules.
This is not to say that it was a free market. Particularly in Texas, with its legacy of plantation slavery, Mexicans were treated by anglos as a conquered people, with all that implies. But the problematic relationship between the two peoples had little to do with immigration and everything to do with political power.
In his classic work North from Mexico, Carey McWilliams considered what distinguished Mexicans from the other immigrant groups who streamed into the United States in the decades before 1920. âComing to Americaâ from Mexico was not a typical...